The Lady and the Monk (38 page)

This it was, I assumed, that produced the notorious supermoms, who trained all their formidable powers of will on Juniorchan’s success, and this it was that began to explain that other infamous figure of urban folklore, the rapacious landlady, who threw herself on any foreigner with such naked intensity that he was left, very often, shaken, almost terrified, by the vehemence of her unspent passions. If the first cliché of being a foreign male in Japan was finding a faultless dream girl, the second was to find oneself almost consumed by the ravening ardor of these women, who could, if they chose, turn that same unearthly attention, in an instant, on someone else. Regardless of their object, they were as obsessive and Zen-pointed in love as in every other pursuit and brought the same degree of concentration, and full-bodied surrender, to their affections that they might elsewhere bring to their company, or their baseball team, or their religion.

Now, though, for the first time ever, Sachiko seemed to have moved beyond mere diversions — first Zen, then aerobics, then a-ha, then me — to some larger sense of destination. And as she did so, inevitably, she found her whole society arrayed in a vengeful chorus all around her. Her mother had told her that if she continued the course, she would never talk to her again. Her brother, recently returned from Switzerland, had warned her that she was “little balloon. If not usual Japanese-style life, I cannot stay ground.” Her Japanese friends were either jealous or disapproving of her for seeking out the freedom they had so diligently denied themselves. And her husband
was sorrowfully bewildered, gallantly giving her a tour-conductor record for her birthday, then silently going off to another woman. Only her father, the longtime adversary whom she affectionately thought of as a child, now became an unlikely ally, secretly urging her to see the world (and asking her if she’d take him with her).

Watching her swimming bravely against the current, I longed to do everything I could to help her. One day, therefore, in early summer, I invited her on a tour of Osaka Airport, only the third time in her thirty-one years she had ever visited this thorough-fare of dreams scarcely an hour from her home. In wonder, when we arrived, she gazed up at all the people moving off to other lands and lives, and tried out the new phrases she had learned. “De-par-ture lounge,” she spelled out to herself. “In-ternational arr-i-val.” “CIQ,” she proudly informed me (customs/immigration/quarantine). Together we stood before the departure board, and she recited to herself the destinations clicking over, a registry of hopes.

After that, still far from Japan, we traveled to Kobe, the city closest to a foreign place, and nibbled on tacos in a Mexican restaurant, complete with Mexican waitress,
piñatas
, and ponchos on the wall, then climbed up to a tiny second-story sari shop, with soft sitar music piped through elegant, silk-wrapped chambers, copies of
Vogue
lying beneath framed Kashmiri miniatures. On the way back into town, we stopped inside the English House and posed for photographs in Victorian gear (Japanese tourist sites always had these props on hand, so that one could actually occupy a foreign identity for a moment and have the moment commemorated). “I little crazy?” she asked, more in hope than apprehension. Craziness, I could tell, was the foreign country to which I could admit her.

In some ways, I was discovering, Sachiko seemed to know everything about the world, sampling the products and photogenic images of different cultures as easily as in some International Expo. Yet in some ways, she knew nothing. In geography,
as in everything, the Japanese seemed to favor a ruthlessly edited version of the world, converting each country into a collection of gift shop pleasantries and postcard images. The classic example was the TV documentaries in which some pretty young hostess led viewers through a Third World hellhole, either screening out the suffering in search of scenic vistas or treating it as a kind of artificial prop that only increased the quaintness and exoticism. Even the Japanese tourists I ran across abroad seemed not really keen to understand or penetrate other cultures, but content just to collect them, and to snap up a few Taj Mahal souvenirs or pictures of the Eiffel Tower to take back home like trophies. The rest of the world, like Japan itself, they saw mostly through rose-colored lenses or through blinkers.

So when I mentioned Bhutan to Sachiko, she knew every last detail of this picturesque land, where the people, wearing their own versions of kimono, resembled some theme-park recreation of the Muromachi period; Japanese TV had shown a famous documentary on the subject. As for Burma, Central Asia, the caravan stops along the romantic Silk Road, now being featured in every Japanese book and screen, she was all but definitive. Yet when I mentioned Nicaragua, she had never heard of it, and eager only for good news, she, like nearly every Japanese I knew, had never heard of the Cold War, was shocked to learn that Washington and Moscow were ideologically opposed, knew nothing at all about China’s difficult reforms.

When I took her later that afternoon to an exhibition of anti-apartheid art, partially sponsored by the tireless
gaijin
crusaders of Kyoto, she was stunned and horrified; incredulous to learn of a place where such discrimination was employed (though to foreign eyes, racism and segregation were scarcely alien to Japan). And as we watched a video of Afrikaners talking about their experiences with the system, Sachiko’s eyes filled with tears and she lost all words. On heading out, she asked me if I would take her to
Cry Freedom
and
A World
Apart
, and when I told her that Japanese were considered honorary whites in South Africa, she could scarcely contain her indignation: “Why this system? Not so fair! This system very terrible!”

It amused me to find that I, least politically informed of creatures, was introducing her now to many of the things that Japan so carefully screened out: to inequity, to unexpectedness, even to tipping (though when I tried to explain this habit to her, she looked quite shocked at the notion of institutionalized bribery; “service,” in Japan, meant not an extra charge but, in fact, an extra dish or gift that the customer received
gratis
— and in any case, every gift here left the recipient doubly indebted).

Through the world I inhabited too, Sachiko was ending up in situations she had never known before. Slipping into the Western world, as through some Lewis Carroll looking glass, she had entered a world of fun-house inversions and fairy-tale shocks, in which new conventions loomed up at her as suddenly and scarily as the glowing skeletons in the Haunted House to which I took her once, which left her clinging to my arm in a state of happy terror. One day, she called my guesthouse and was answered by the eccentric young gay from Harvard who had somehow grown fascinated with her.
Moshi-moshi
, she called out, uncertainly;
Moshi-moshi
, he replied, recognizing her voice. “I love you.” There was, I gathered, a long silence on the other end, and then an uneasy giggle. “No, really,” he went on. “I love you. If you weren’t already claimed, I’d want you for my own. If you were my girlfriend, I’d never want a boy again.”

Four days after the incident, Sachiko was still shaken by the conversation. Everything she considered sacred had been defamed. To talk to a self-professed gay was itself an unnerving novelty for her. But to get a frank admission from him, and to hear from a relative stranger intimacies of the kind she had never heard in public even from her husband — it clearly left the ground beneath her shaking.

Just as often, though, her innocence seemed almost proof
against the world, making the world seem innocent. When I introduced her one day to an English friend, she looked at him with awe as he politely complimented her on the beauties of her town. Then, unable to contain herself any longer, she abruptly said, “Your country very beautiful country. I many time dream this place. Cinderella, many big castle, fairy princess. When I high school size, I always dream this world. Your world little Emily Brontë world.”

He burst out laughing and went on rhapsodizing about Japanese teahouses and Sōseki’s novels.

But Sachiko was not to be sidetracked, or to be diverted in this rare encounter with an emissary from the land of dreams.

“Japanese person much love your country air. British Airways!” She was proud of her new knowledge.

“British Airways?” he repeated, incredulous, thinking of rock-hard rolls and hockey-stick attendants. “I usually try to go with JAL.”

“Japanese person not so like this air. Very cold feeling; little distant.”

“But, Sachiko,” I butted in, “isn’t that how all Japanese service is? Isn’t that, in fact, the glory and aim of Japanese service?”

She looked confused.

“We in the West usually like to go Thai Air,” I went on, “or Singapore Airlines. Many people think those two are the best in the world.”

“Japanese person not so like Thai Air!”

“Why?”

“Bad smell!”

“Bad smell?”

“True! Asian air very bad smell! Japanese person like only British Airway. Cathay Pacific too — but very expensive.”

“But, Sachiko, Cathay Pacific is Asian too.”

She stood firm. “Japanese person like!”

* * *

She in turn, of course, was introducing me to many things, not least the shallowness of my own reading of Japan. As I went on blathering about Hiroshige or Buson, I realized that it must have sounded as jejune and uninformed to her as typical Japanese raptures about Chopin did to us. And when I told her, proudly, about my visit to the famous geisha show, she was singularly unimpressed. “You know Michael Douglas movie?” “You mean
Fatal Attraction?
” “Ping-pong! This Miyako Odori, little same feeling!”

I got a similar response, once, when I suggested we visit the love shrine at Kiyomizu and make the ritual walk, eyes closed, along a series of twelve stepping-stones, that was the famous highlight of every tourist’s visit. Listening to my suggestion, she could hardly contain her mirth. “This little teenage place,” she giggled. “Usually only high school person come here this place.” It was the same response, I realized, I would have received had I invited a mature thirty-one-year-old New Yorker, and mother of two, to a Coney Island photo booth.

Often, too, as I inflicted on her haiku of my own composition, the effect must have been as jarring to her as hearing a prayer rewritten. And once, eager to show off my command of Japanese wisdom, I quoted to her Bashō’s famous, plangent cry of wonder, an epic in three words, “
Matsushima ya / Ah, Matsushima ya / Matsushima ya
.” But somehow, in the heat of the moment, I began intoning, “
Matsushita ya / Ah, Matsushita ya
 …,” converting the poet’s poignant ode to a moonlit island into a call for the Japanese equivalent of Data General. That same day, she told me excitedly, “My friend give me little foreigner poem. Very beautiful poem. Please you see.” And handed over some verses by Leo Buscaglia.

G
REEN, GREEN
, green were the colors of Kyoto in the summer: the dripping green of moss gardens, the thick dark emerald of the pine trees on the temple slopes; the illuminated jade of white-barked bamboo shot through with summer light. Green lichen, green hills, green light. Always the sharpened intensity of solid colors in Japan, so strong they knocked the breath out of one: pink against blue, gold on black, a blaze of reds. And the beauty of a city that measured its year by its blossomings: the coming of plums to Kitano in early winter, the cherries on Mount Hiei in late April, the deepening of moss in the rainy season.

In the early days of summer, with the first suggestion of returning haziness and heat, Kyoto took on a Californian lightness, and the days were motionless and blue. Lazy cumulus days without a trace of wind. Red and blue carp banners drooping from the rooftops, and lazy Bach toccatas in local coffee shops. A Constable world of suspended motion. Then, as the heat came on, a creeping intensity: Sachiko sucking ice cubes in the sultry nights and giving me new wind chimes to keep me cool (as courtiers once had spread silk cloth across the mountains to shield an emperor’s eyes from summer glare); shopgirls eating long, fine, pure-white noodles served on ice.

Along the avenue of trees that led to Shimogamo Shrine, weekend painters sat relaxing at their easels above a dry stream, silent on their chairs as they tried to transcribe the intensity of green and blue. Etsuko, meeting me outside the shrine, greeted me with a poem she had just translated:

Then she led me into Kawabata’s house, turned this day into a gallery of dreams, lustrous kimono spread out upon their racks like carpets or fine silks, ten-thousand-dollar gowns with fifteen-thousand-dollar
obi
, bearing the faintest tracery of cranes, or phoenixes, across their midnight blue. Farther on, in a room full of windows, we took a traditional meal while a few chattering women tried to set me up in marriage with their daughters.

“I think it is because we are externally so powerless,” she later explained, putting the encounter into perspective, “that we Japanese women must be powerful in spirit. And so it comes out in these violent and inverse ways, as in the
hannya
.”

“
Hannya?
”

“You must know this?” I didn’t. “It is the recurrent figure in Nō drama and in so many of our stories through the centuries, like
Dōjōji
: the woman who consumes a monk in the fury of her passion. The term, of course, was first created by a monk; it refers to the first word of a very famous sutra. But if you say
hannya
today, most people think instantly of the demon-woman.” She smiled. “I think it must be a theme men like, it is repeated so often in our literature.”

In the middle of summer, the third great festival of the Kyoto year transformed the city again into a display of scenic backdrops. On the eve of Gion Matsuri, the narrow lanes at the center of town were clogged with thirty-one elaborate, multistory floats, smothered in treasures and portable shrines, wobbly on their giant wooden wheels. Around them, the ancient houses were open to the street now, floodlit, their living rooms on show like a series of illuminated stage sets.
House after tiny wooden house set up as in some spectral diorama: paintings, lacquer screens, old men playing cards around low tables. Occasionally, a group of naked-chested boys streaking through the lanes, making a strange cacophony as they passed.